Learning new chord shapes quickly
Learning and playing songs you love can be a lot of fun but at the same time, learning them quickly can also prove challenging.
No matter where you are with your guitar playing, learning new chord shapes is an important part of playing the guitar. The chord shapes that you will be learning will become more complex and you will have more of them to remember. This is when people often find difficult.
What normally happens when you learn new chords?
Picture that you’ve just found your next favourite song that you want to learn, you’ve sat down, trawled through the internet to find the best version and now you’re ready to learn it.
You grab your guitar, and before you know it, a few weeks have gone by and you’re still trying to get the chords in the right order, get your fingers in the right place, or remember when the chords change.
I remember this happening to me all the time and I’ve seen it countless times with students too when they first start. Learning your favourite songs don’t have to feel like a complete struggle and there are little ways you can use to help you learn chords, chord progressions, and songs much faster than before.
Why you’re not learning chords faster:
There’s a reason why it takes some time to learn and memorise chords or chord progressions.
That’s because when most people sit down to practice them, they’re not practising the act of memorisation.
You brain is only memorising things the very first time you try to find something, every time after that, it’s recalling information (even though it may not feel like it). So that every time you play through it, your brain is trying to recall what happened but it’s not actually being memorised.
How to learn chords faster:
To learn chords and chord progressions faster, what you want to do is find/play the chords, or chord progression, once and only once.
For example:
If the chords you’re trying to learn are C, G, Em, F, with the fretting hand only (no strumming), make the shape of each chord once, then you’re done.
Playing through the chords with something else
Before going back to the chords again, do something else random on the guitar (this could be a scale, a random set of frets, a fingerpicking pattern etc… KEEP THIS SHORT), this helps to reset your brain so when you find the chords again, you’re practising memorising them.
If you do this exercise for 2 weeks, you should notice a difference in how fast you’re able to remember and recall the chords you practised.
Hope this article helps you with learning chords faster. No matter where you are in learning the guitar, there will always be new chords to learn. And this process will really help you
About author
Guitar Tuition East London is a guitar school based in London, England. Helping local guitarists not only improve their guitar playing but have lots of fun along the way through their electric and acoustic guitar lessons in London.